As ExxonMobil’s CEO, it’s Rex Tillerson’s job to promote the
hydraulic fracturing enabling the recent oil and gas boom, and fight
regulatory oversight. The oil company is the biggest natural gas
producer in the U.S., relying on the controversial drilling technology
to extract it.

The exception is when Tillerson’s $5 million property value might be
harmed. Tillerson has joined a lawsuit that cites fracking’s
consequences in order to block the construction of a 160-foot water
tower next to his and his wife’s Texas home.

The Wall Street Journal
reports the tower would supply water to a nearby fracking site, and the
plaintiffs argue the project would cause too much noise and traffic
from hauling the water from the tower to the drilling site. The water
tower, owned by Cross Timbers Water Supply Corporation, “will sell water
to oil and gas explorers for fracing [sic] shale formations leading to
traffic with heavy trucks on FM 407, creating a noise nuisance and
traffic hazards,” the suit says.

Though Tillerson’s name is on the lawsuit, a lawyer representing him
said his concern is about the devaluation of his property, not fracking
specifically.

When he is acting as Exxon CEO, not a homeowner, Tillerson has lashed
out at fracking critics and proponents of regulation. “This type of
dysfunctional regulation is holding back the American economic recovery,
growth, and global competitiveness,” he said in 2012. Natural gas production “is an old technology just being applied, integrated with some new technologies,” he said in another interview. “So the risks are very manageable.”

"You can’t just come in the neighborhood like you’re Columbus and kill off the Native Americans"

Filmmaker Spike Lee has never been one to hold back his feelings.
This, after all, is a man who’s compared Tyler Perry to Amos n’ Andy and
said that Clint Eastwood ought to have an encounter “with a .44 Bulldog.” And
at an African American History Month lecture at Pratt Institute Tuesday
evening, he had some strong words for the mostly local crowd, this time
about “the other side” of gentrification. His response to an audience
member who brought it up: “Let me just kill you right now.”

Lee,
who’s been famed for his explorations of class tensions and community
ever since his groundbreaking 1989 “Do the Right Thing,” went on to
expound about “some bullshit article in the New York Times saying ‘the
good of gentrification.’” As Joe Coscarelli reports Wednesday in New
York, Spike told the crowd, “I don’t believe that” before launching into an expletive-laced seven-minute discourse on the G-word.

“I
grew up here in Fort Greene,” he explained. “I grew up here in New
York. It’s changed. And why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers
in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed-Stuy, in Crown Heights for the
facilities to get better? The garbage wasn’t picked up every
motherfuckin’ day when I was living in 165 Washington Park … The police
weren’t around. When you see white mothers pushing their babies in
strollers, three o’clock in the morning on 125th Street, that must tell
you something.”

But what, exactly, does it tell you? Earlier this month, the reliably
rage-inducing Times Real Estate section ran a piece on the
controversial “Case for and Against a Bed-Stuy Historic District,” a piece on what’s still one of the most dangerous, crime-riddled neighborhoods
in New York City that came replete with dainty captions like “In
Bed-Stuy, many a playful turret is to be found.” And New York magazine
recently asked, “Is Gentrification All Bad?”
in a story that focused heavily on the “Dickensian juxtapositions” of
changing lower-class New York neighborhoods like Inwood, where I’ve
lived for the past eight years. My family and I moved here when we were
squeezed out of our old, insanely gentrifying neighborhood in – where
else? – Brooklyn. Now Inwood has become the subject of much of the
recent conversation around gentrification. The Wall Street Journal sat up and took notice
last month when the mostly Dominican area got its very first Starbucks —
where it naturally began offering overpriced, “exclusive” café con
leche.

With his trademark passion and irritability, Lee made
strong points Tuesday night about the exasperation felt by long-term
residents when newcomers arrive with an inflated sense of entitlement.
“The motherfuckin’ people moved in last year,” Lee said, “and called the
cops on my father. He doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic!”
And he certainly can’t be argued with regarding his questions over “Why
did it take this great influx of white people to get the schools better?
Why’s there more police protection in Bed-Stuy and Harlem now? Why’s
the garbage getting picked up more regularly? We been here!”

Yet
in Lee’s eagerness to be enraged, he glosses over the profound
complexities of neighborhood flux. He rather dramatically announces that
“You can’t just come in the neighborhood and start bogarting and say,
like you’re motherfuckin’ Columbus and kill off the Native Americans. Or
what they do in Brazil, what they did to the indigenous people.” The
opening of a Connecticut Muffin shop is not now nor ever will be akin to
genocide. And Lee can rail about “the white people” moving in, but that
simplistic breakdown ignores issues of income and class.

A federal judge today rules Texas's marriage ban unconstitutional.

District
Judge Orlando Garcia ruled that the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings on
marriage last summer trumps Texas's state constitutional amendment,
which voters overwhelmingly approved in 2005.

“Today’s
court decision is not made in defiance of the great people of Texas or
the Texas Legislature, but in compliance with the U.S. Constitution and
Supreme Court precedent,” he said in his order,The Dallas Morning News reports.
“Without a rational relation to a legitimate governmental purpose,
state-imposed inequality can find no refuge in our U.S. Constitution.”
The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by two couples, Cleo DeLeon and
Nicole Dimetman, and Victor Holmes and Mark Phariss.

Garcia
stayed his ruling from taking effect until the case goes through the
appeal process, so same-sex couples in Texas cannot being marrying
immediately. He said the case would probably be one of 23 other pending
state-level marriage cases that head would head to the Supreme Court for
a ruling.

According
to the report, Texas attorney general and gubernatorial hopeful Greg
Abbott is likely to appeal the ruling. Abbott strongly opposes marriage
equality, as does the other four Republicans who are running against him
in the primary election.

The
ruling is stayed, pending appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Fifth Circuit, so same-sex couples will still be unable to marry in
Texas. But Rebecca L. Robertson, legal and policy director of the ACLU
of Texas, says the ruling is still one step closer to the "inevitable
end of official discrimination by the state of Texas. Gay and lesbian
couples want the same thing as other loving couples -- to stand before
family and friends and declare their lifetime commitment to each other,
and to enjoy the same recognition and protection for their families that
only marriage can bring. We applaud the judge’s preliminary ruling, but
we also recognize that there is a great deal of hard work to do to
bring full equality to every Texan.”

As
they reel from a succession of defeats in courtrooms and legislatures,
opponents of same-sex marriage have a new chance this week to play one
of their most emotional and, they hope, potent cards: the claim that
having parents of the same sex is bad for children.

In
a federal court in Detroit starting Tuesday, in the first trial of its
kind in years, the social science research on family structure and child
progress will be openly debated, with expert testimony and
cross-examination, offering an unusual public dissection of the methods
of sociology and the intersection of science and politics.

Scholars
testifying in defense of Michigan’s constitutional ban on same-sex
marriage aim to sow doubt about the wisdom of change. They brandish a
few sharply disputed recent studies — the fruits of a concerted and
expensive effort by conservatives to sponsor research by sympathetic
scholars — to suggest that children of same-sex couples do not fare as
well as those raised by married heterosexuals.

That
view will be challenged in court by longtime scholars in the field,
backed by major professional organizations, who call those studies
fatally flawed. These scholars will describe a near consensus that,
other factors like income and stability being equal, children of
same-sex couples do just as well as those of heterosexual couples.

“The
overwhelming evidence so far is that there’s not much difference
between children raised by heterosexual or same-sex parents,” Andrew J. Cherlin, a prominent sociologist of family issues at Johns Hopkins University who is not involved in the case, said in an interview.

The
last time these issues were debated in a federal court, in California
nearly four years ago, social science opponents of same-sex marriage
underwent withering challenges in pretrial depositions and did not even
appear in court.

An initiative to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the war is selectively choosing which facts to tell

It’s
2053 — 20 years since you needed a computer, tablet, or smart phone to
go online. At least, that’s true in the developed world: you know,
China, India, Brazil, and even some parts of the United States.
Cybernetic eye implants allow you to see everything with a digital
overlay. And once facial recognition software was linked to high-speed
records searches, you had the lowdown on every person standing around
you. Of course, in polite society you still introduce yourself as if
you don’t instantly know another person’s net worth, arrest record, and
Amazooglebook search history. (Yes, the fading old-tech firms Amazon,
Google, and Facebook merged in 2033.) You also get a tax break these
days if you log into one of the government’s immersive propaganda
portals. (Nope, “propaganda” doesn’t have negative connotations
anymore.) So you choose the Iraq War 50th Anniversary Commemoration
Experience and take a stroll through the virtual interactive timeline.

Look to your right, and you see happy Iraqis pulling down Saddam’s statue and showering U.S. Marines with flowers and candy.
Was that exactly how it happened? Who really remembers? Now, you’re
walking on the flight deck of what they used to call an aircraft carrier
behind a flight-suit-clad President George W. Bush. He turns and shoots you a thumbs-up under a “mission accomplished”
banner. A voice beamed into your head says that Bush proclaimed
victory that day, but that for years afterward, valiant U.S. troops
would have to re-win the war again and again. Sounds a little strange,
but okay.

A few more paces down the digital road and you encounter a sullen looking woman holding
a dog leash, the collar attached to a man lying nude on the floor of a
prison. Your digital tour guide explains: “An unfortunate picture was
taken. Luckily, the bad apple was punished and military honor was
restored.” Fair enough. Soon, a digital General David Petraeus strides
forward and shoots you another thumbs-up.
(It looks as if they just put a new cyber-skin over the President Bush
avatar to save money.) “He surged his way to victory and the mission
was accomplished again,” you hear over strains of the National Anthem and a chorus of “hooahs.”

Past is Prologue

Admittedly,
we humans are lousy at predicting the future, so don’t count on any of
this coming to pass: no eye implants, no voices beamed into your head,
no Amazooglebook. None of it. Except, maybe, that Iraq War timeline.
If the present is any guide, government-sanctioned, counterfeit history
is in your future.

Let me explain…

In 2012, the Pentagon kicked off a 13-year program to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, complete with a sprawling website that includes a “history and education” component. Billed as
a “public service” provided by the Department of Defense, the United
States of America Vietnam War Commemoration site boasts of its
“resources for teachers and students in the grades 7-12” and includes a
selection of official government documents, all of them produced from
1943-1954; that is, only during the earliest stages of modern U.S.
involvement in what was then called Indochina.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Even
if someone printed this out and mailed it to you, you get your
information from the Internet, a magical place that is increasingly
controlled and manipulated by greedy, lazy corporations. Free speech, as
we know it, is gone.

The Federal Communications Commission has
refused to classify the dumb pipes that bring the Internet to your front
door as dumb pipes, what’s known as “common carrier.” Instead, the
regulator treats broadband Internet providers as information services,
like AOL or MSNBC.com, because they give you email and ugly home pages
to look at. But really because powerful, anti-competitive companies like
Comcast have spent tremendous amounts of money to keep it that way. A
judge said the FCC can’t impose net neutrality rules on broadband until
it correctly identifies ISPs as common carriers, and so right now it’s
absolute mayhem.

Nilay Patel of The Verge is a lawyer and tech writer who has written a must-read document for anyone who cares about free speech on the Internet.Here’s an excerpt:

In
the meantime, the companies that control the internet have continued
down a dark path, free of any oversight or meaningful competition to
check their behavior. In January, AT&T announced a new “sponsored
data” plan that would dramatically alter the fierce one-click-away
competition that’s thus far characterized the internet. Earlier this
month, Comcast announced plans to merge with Time Warner Cable, creating
an internet service behemoth that will serve 40 percent of Americans in
19 of the 20 biggest markets with virtually no rivals.

And after
months of declining Netflix performance on Comcast’s network, the two
companies announced a new “paid peering” arrangement on Sunday, which
will see Netflix pay Comcast for better access to its customers, a
capitulation Netflix has been trying to avoid for years. Paid peering
arrangements are common among the network companies that connect the
backbones of the internet, but consumer companies like Netflix have
traditionally remained out of the fray — and since there’s no oversight
or transparency into the terms of the deal, it’s impossible to know what
kind of precedent it sets. Broadband industry insiders insist loudly
that the deal is just business as usual, while outside observers are
full of concerns about the loss of competition and the increasing power
of consolidated network companies. Either way, it’s clear that Netflix
has decided to take matters — and costs — into its own hands, instead of
relying on rational policy to create an effective and fair marketplace.

In
a perfect storm of corporate greed and broken government, the internet
has gone from vibrant center of the new economy to burgeoning tool of
economic control. Where America once had Rockefeller and Carnegie, it
now has Comcast’s Brian Roberts, AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, and
Verizon’s Lowell McAdam, robber barons for a new age of infrastructure
monopoly built on fiber optics and kitty GIFs.

There is so much more, and even some hope, but you’ll have to go to The Verge to read the whole story.

One point worth underlining: As Todd O’Boyle of Common Cause recently told us on Truthdig Radio,
this is fundamentally a free speech issue. A handful of companies with
nothing but dollar signs in their eyes have unprecedented control over
all American communication. Think about these questions: Where do you
get your news? Does that site pay to gain access to you? Comcast owns
NBC and NBC News and it’s trying to buy Time Warner so it can be the
only truly broadband Internet provider in 19 of the 20 biggest metro
areas. In the absence of any regulation, does Comcast have any incentive
to let you visit CBS News? Or Truthdig?

The
United States is entering a strange new world, where Comcast is our
politburo and Verizon is big brother. And the NSA? Well that’s a whole
other horrifying blog post. You may have to read about it through the
postal service, because the Internet is fucked.

Three
floors above a Manhattan street of loading docks and coffee shops, in a
functional room of folding chairs and linoleum tile, a man who
introduced himself as Vic began to speak. “Today is my 35th
anniversary,” he said. The dozen people seated around him applauded, and
several even whooped in support.

By
most overt measures, this gathering two weeks ago was just another
meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, one of its multitude of meetings
worldwide. At the session’s end an hour later, however, as the
participants clasped hands, instead of reciting the Lord’s Prayer in
usual A.A. fashion, they said together, “Live and let live.”

This
meeting, as the parting phrase suggests, is one of a growing number
within A.A. that appeal to nonreligious people in recovery, who might
variously describe themselves as agnostics, atheists, humanists or
freethinkers. While such groups were rare even a decade ago, now they
number about 150 nationally. A first-ever convention will be held in
November in Santa Monica, Calif.

The
boom in nonreligious A.A. represents another manifestation of a more
visible and confident humanist movement in the United States, one that
has featured public figures such as Bill Maher, Sam Harris and the late
Christopher Hitchens. Yet this recent trend within A.A. also marks a
departure from the organization’s traditional emphasis on religion.

“A.A. starts at its core with honesty,” said Dorothy, 39, who heads the steering committee for the We Agnostics and Freethinkers International A.A. Convention.
“And how can you be honest in recovery if you’re not honest in your own
beliefs? If you don’t believe in the God they’re praying to, that’s not
honest practice.”

(A.A.
members hold to a tradition of not being identified by full name. I sat
in on a portion of one secular A.A. meeting with the advance consent of
the attendees.)

Seven
of A.A.’s famous 12 steps refer either to a deity — “God,” “Him” or “a
Power greater than ourselves” — or to religious practices such as
prayer. The ultimate goal of sobriety, as the final step states, is to
achieve a “spiritual awakening.” Besides the Lord’s Prayer, the Serenity
Prayer is a staple of A.A. meetings.

From Huffington Post:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-b-keegan/the-gops-ted-nugent-probl_b_4855100.htmlMichael Keegan02/25/2014
The Republican Party in the era of the Tea Party and the "autopsy"
can't make up its mind. Torn between expanding its base so that it can
survive in the
long term and appeasing its loyalists so it can survive in the short
term, the party doesn't know where to go. The choice boils down to
winning a few more
seats in November and writing off the future of the party. Oddly,
November seems to be winning every time.

For Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott the choice seems easy.
He chose Ted Nugent, the physical embodiment of the off-the-rails
toxicity that
Republicans just don't know how to quit. Abbott certainly had to
know the stir he'd cause when he
invited Nugent
to join him on the campaign trail last week.

Ted Nugent is not just a former rocker who happens to be a Republican. Nugent's infamous "subhuman mongrel"
slur is just a
representative sample of the bile he produces on a regular basis. He has
threatened the president, saying, "Obama, he's a piece of shit, and I
told him to suck on my machine gun," told
an audience to "keep a fucking gun in your hand, boys" in
response to the Obama administration, implied the president is like a coyote who needs to be shot,
and said before the 2012 election that if the "vile, evil America-hating" Obama were to be reelected, Nugent would be "either dead or in
jail by this time next year."(For the record, Nugent is still very much alive and free to make statements like the above.)

Why listen to Nugent (as People For the American Way's Right Wing Watch does more often than they would probably like)? Because he doesn't just shout his
rants from the stage at his concerts. He shares the stage with people like Greg Abbott.

In a time when many Republicans are trying to moderate the rhetoric
they use to explain their extreme policies, Greg Abbott is just the
latest who
apparently has no such concerns. He 's more than happy to provide a
platform for Nugent, an unabashedly violent, and unapologetic racist
spokesperson who
exults in attacking the president- - when the president is Barack
Obama, that is.
Nugent has speculated whether "it would have been
best had the South won the Civil War"; suggested banning people
who owe no federal income tax from voting; lashed out at "those well-fed motherfucker food
stamp cocksuckers"; and blamed Trayvon
Martin's death on the "mindless tendency to violence we see in black communities across America."

Once upon a time, America's religious communities were politically moderate. Then along came the evangelicals

As
late as 1976, the political sensibilities of revivalist evangelicals
were still unformed when many of them voted Democratic for Jimmy Carter,
largely on the basis that he had declared himself “born again.” Prior
to 1976, “born again” was not a familiar phrase in mainstream public
discourse. Moreover, the term “evangelical” was seldom used, at least
not in connection to politics. When Newsweek declared 1976 to be “The
Year of the Evangelical,” the publicity helped to create a sense of
potential among evangelicals, who began to think of themselves as a
political force. Conservative evangelical and Catholic leaders, however,
soon became disillusioned with President Carter. He supported the Equal
Rights Amendment, he did not take a stand against abortion, and he was
friendly to the Democratic Party agenda to guarantee rights for
homosexuals and to broaden the definition of the family. In that
context, in 1979 fundamentalist Jerry Falwell founded the Moral
Majority, a political-action organization to mobilize religious
conservatives. Revivalist evangelicalism had suddenly emerged as a
conspicuous player in national politics.

The government was not,
of course, the only force in furthering the sexual revolution. Rather,
the courts and governmental agencies were responding to much larger
social trends and agendas that were energized by vigorous movements and
lobbies and supported by most of the media and the intellectual
community. The mainstream media and commercial interests often supported
the new permissiveness. Nonetheless, for those alarmed by the sexual
revolution, the government’s role in permitting and promoting it was
sufficient to provoke a political response, even among evangelicals who
traditionally had warned against political involvements.

One of
the factors evident in the support for Ronald Reagan in 1980 was
nostalgia for the 1950s. Many conservative Americans had been alarmed by
the cultural changes unleashed by the counterculture and antiwar
movements of the 1960s and felt that something essential about the
culture was fast slipping away. Reagan himself cultivated his image as a
champion of traditional values. Just one of many examples was a
“Morning in America” series of TV ads in his 1984 campaign depicting the
small-town America of more peaceful and ordered days. Unquestionably,
Reagan’s staunch anticommunism also evoked an image of the 1950s, a time
when Americans were proud to be united by their flag-waving patriotism.
Newly politicized revivalist evangelicals were no doubt attracted by
this nostalgia, as were many other Republican voters, but they added
their own variation on the theme. They were not simply proposing to
bring America back to a time when traditional family values, respect for
authority, and unquestioning love of nation were intact. Rather, they
were blending such Reaganesque images with something more basic:
America, they said, needed to return to its “Christian foundations.” And
understanding what revivalist evangelicals had in mind by such rhetoric
is one key to understanding the cultural wars and revivalist
evangelicalism’s part in them.

Many believe that Reagan or Goldwater founded modern conservatism. But it's Nixon whose legacy truly lives on

The issue of who founded modern conservatism is important not just to
the historical community, which lives to debate the origins of anything
and everything. It has deep significance for any politician who seeks
to invest himself with such august symbolism, as with anyone who tries
to fathom American politics today.

Barry Goldwater is a logical
candidate. Despite his failure in the presidential lists, he advocated
conservative principles long before any other national political figure,
making him a prophet before his time. Pat Buchanan dubbed him no less
than “the father of us all.” Daniel McCarthy, in The American
Conservative, believed that “his place in conservative history, and
conservatives’ hearts, is settled … each branch of the conservative
movement can plausibly trace itself back to some tendency… in the
Goldwater effort.” And Phyllis Schafly called the Arizona senator “the
undisputed original leader of the modern conservative movement … It is
hard to overestimate the importance of Barry Goldwater.”

Ronald
Reagan is the current favorite. Fox Nation quoted Nile Gardiner of
Britain’s conservative paper the Telegraph that the former actor created
“the greatest U. S. presidency of the 20th century.” The Heritage
Foundation pronounced Reagan “the second most popular and consequential
Republican president after Abraham Lincoln … he is credited with
reviving the national economy, recovering the nation’s optimism about
the future, and taking the pivotal steps to end the Cold War struggle
with the Soviet Union.” The social conservative champion Family Research
Council noted that, “Every Republican presidential candidate claims the
mantle of Ronald Reagan … As they jockey for the … presidential
nomination, they invoke Ronald Reagan: ‘I believe as Ronald Reagan
believed …’”

An unlikely candidate, however, would be Richard
Nixon. Despised by liberals for his early red-baiting, his presidential
record remains shocking by modern conservative standards. He proposed,
for example, wage and price controls, a massive federal takeover of the
national economy that would be branded Sovietism by today’s right. Under
Nixon’s watch, the federal government created the Environmental
Protection Agency, and introduced affirmative action. One blogger wrote
that no Democrat today could get away with what Nixon tried to do, let
alone a Republican.

Yet, in one critical way, Nixon really is the creator of conservatism as it exists today in America.

The
big pay cheques of the tech boom are changing the City by the Bay as
Twitter and Google millionaires take over its bohemian haunts. Could
this be the end of the city as we know it?

Poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti came to San Francisco in
1951 because he heard it was a great place to be a bohemian. He settled
in the Italian working-class neighbourhood of North Beach with its
cheap rents and European ambience. And before long he put the city on
the world's counter-cultural map by publishing the work of Beat poets
such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. But despite his status as world
and local literary legend, the 94-year-old co-owner of the renowned
City Lights bookshop and publishing house doesn't feel so at home in the
City by the Bay anymore.

He complains of a "soulless group of
people", a "new breed" of men and women too busy with iPhones to "be
here" in the moment, and shiny new Mercedes-Benzs on his street. The
major art galley in central San Francisco
that has shown Ferlinghetti's work for two decades is closing because
it can't afford the new rent. It, along with several other galleries,
will make way for a cloud computing startup called MuleSoft
said to have offered to triple the rent. "It is totally shocking to see
Silicon Valley take over the city," says Ferlinghetti, who still rents
in North Beach. "San Francisco is radically changing and we don't know
where it is going to end up."

Until recently, San Francisco, California
– a small city of around 825,000 poised on the tip of a peninsular on
America's western edge that sprang up during the 1840s gold rush –
wasn't thought of as a centre for business. Rather, it was famed as an
artistic, bohemian place with a history of flowering counter-cultures
that spilled over and changed America and the world, from the beats in
North Beach to the hippies in the hilly region of Haight- Ashbury to the
gay rights movement in the Castro neighbourhood. Jefferson Airplane's
Paul Kantner called it "49 square miles surrounded by reality".

But
times have changed in Ferlinghetti's city. San Francisco has become the
hype- and capital-fuelled epicentre of America's technology industry,
which has traditionally centred on the string of suburban cities
known as Silicon Valley 40 miles to the south. In 2011, Mayor Ed Lee
introduced tax breaks for Twitter and several other tech companies to
encourage them to settle in and revitalise the downtown San Francisco
neighbourhood South of Market, or Soma, and help the city climb out of
the recession. Soma has become home to some of the most important
companies in the new economy, such as Twitter and Dropbox, and many small startups hoping to challenge them. AngelList,
a networking site for investors, now lists 5,249 tech startups in San
Francisco, each worth $4.6m (£2.8m) on average and offering an average
salary of $105,000 (£64,000).

In the following excerpted chapter, scholar Frances Fox Piven
argues that the guarantee of a universal income would facilitate a new
economic fairness and stability to a financial system careening out of
control.

Most of the world is now in the grip of hyper-capitalism, what we
call neoliberalism. This new system has brought us careening economic
instabilities, worsening ecological disasters, brutal wars, a depleted
public sector and poverty in the affluent global north, and the prospect
of mass famine in the global south.

It seems high time to think about alternatives to the capitalist
behemoth. I don’t know whether we will ultimately call the new ways of
organizing our society "socialist," but the values that have inspired
movements for socialism in the past should inform our search. Those
values include a society with sharply reduced inequalities in both
material circumstances and social status. Socialist movements also
aspire to lessen the grinding toil now imposed on those who work for
wages. They dream of an inclusive culture. They fight for democratic
practices and policies in which influence is widely shared. And they
believe in eliminating the pervasive terror in everyday life that is
produced by the exigencies of capitalist markets and the arbitrary power
of the state regimes that support those markets.

No matter how successful the new society is in equalizing earnings
and assets, however, we will have to be concerned about the potential
for poverty and hard times. This might result from exogenous shocks,
such as a drought or earthquakes, or from internal economic
disorganization, including the instabilities produced by efforts to
transform our institutions. Moreover, there will always be people who
are not well suited to the work that is available because of their
physical health or personal disorganization.

How our society treats these people is of great importance. Morally,
it is important because it is unnecessary and cruel for an affluent
society to impose impoverishment and humiliation on some of its members.
It is less often recognized that the treatment of the poor has a large
bearing on the well-being of the entire society.

The poverty policies characteristic of capitalist societies, especially the United States, form a template for what we should not do
in the new society. They also suggest an agenda for constructing the
institutions that will lead to a more equal, more democratic and more
humane society.

It would take a huge defeat or a civil war to kill the GOP -- but its dysfunction may augur a new political era

Since at least the end of the Reagan administration, we’ve seen
occasional pronouncements from political commentators about the
impending breakup of the Republican Party, pulled in one direction by
its fire-breathing conservative base and in another by corporate elites
and Washington insiders. It keeps not happening. One factor here is just
magical thinking on the part of liberals, along with the continual
frustration of losing elections to an opponent who combines troglodyte
social views with discredited economic fantasies and a paranoid,
mythological foreign policy. (Let’s leave aside, for the moment, that on
the latter two questions the Democrats are only marginally better.)
Wouldn’t it be a nicer country if the nasty Republicans, and the
millions of citizens who vote for them, simply went away?

Still,
there really are significant divisions within the GOP, as the party’s
panicked post-2012 retreat on immigration reform, and the humiliating
aftermath of the government shutdown, have made clear. (With lightning
speed, Ted Cruz went from Our Next President to Our Next Prime-Time Fox
News Host.) To the immense frustration of the Republican establishment
in Washington, the party faithful have repeatedly snatched defeat from
the jaws of victory by nominating some Tea Party zealot or Christian
flat-earther who blunders away a potentially winnable statewide election
by saying something stupid about women and sex. As things stand, the
Republicans have a good chance of retaking the Senate majority in this
year’s midterm elections, even though they have no coherent policies on
any major issue and their only platform is to run out the clock on the
Obama administration and hope against hope they can beat Hillary Clinton
in 2016. Amazingly enough, if it weren’t for their propensity to commit
ritual suicide in close elections, the Republicans would already hold the Senate majority, in all likelihood.

To a large extent, the predictions of a GOPocalypse that’s coming
someday soon but not right now are based on observable political and
demographic factors I don’t need to explore at any length here. As John
Judis and Ruy Teixeira argued 12 years ago in “The Emerging Democratic
Majority,” long-term shifts in the American population, as the country
grows steadily more diverse and more metropolitan, would seem to favor
the Democrats. And there’s no question that the Republican Party of 2014
is a peculiar coalition of groups with distinct worldviews and
ideologies that don’t always overlap: The corporate overlords and
1-percenters, the burn-it-down Tea Partyers, the decaying but still
vocal “Christian conservatives” and the Ayn Rand libertarians are united
only by a strident rhetoric of American exceptionalism, a professed
dislike of big government, and by what we might call the identity
politics of whiteness. They can all agree that they hate Obamacare (for
varying reasons) and view the presidency of its author as a continuing
nightmare. But they disagree about almost everything else.

Another
factor in forecasting Republican doom, I think, is the dim historical
sense that political parties are not necessarily permanent phenomena,
and that we’ve had various permutations of a two-party system throughout
American history. Four American presidents belonged to the Whig Party —
actually, the number is six if you count Abraham Lincoln and Rutherford
B. Hayes, who were prominent Whigs before they became Republicans — and
that’s been gone for more than 150 years. The Federalist Party, our
nation’s very first, barely limped into the 19th century and was
dissolved in 1824. What historians now call the Democratic-Republican
Party (technically an ancestor to both of today’s major parties)
dominated national politics for more than 20 years and then abruptly
split apart. Couldn’t some version of what happened to them happen to
today’s Republican Party?

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Like ravenous beasts of prey attacking a weakened antelope, the
forces of subsidized capital and their mercenaries sunk their fangs into
the United Auto Workers (UAW) and its organizing drive at the
Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The UAW narrowly lost –
712 to 626 – and the baying pack of plutocrats exalted, as if they had
just saved western civilization in the anti-union, lower-wage South.

The
days preceding the vote were a corporatist frenzy with corporatist
predators bellowing ‘the sky is falling.’ VW, which sensibly stayed
neutral, but privately supported the UAW’s efforts and its collateral
“works councils” (an arrangement that had stabilized and made their
unionized, higher-paid workers in Germany more productive), must have
wondered on what planet they had landed.

First out of the growling caves were the supine politicians, who
always offer those proposing a factory big taxpayer subsidized bucks to
bring crony capitalism to their region. Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) who,
without citing his source, warned “I’ve had conversations today and
based on those am assured that, should the workers vote against the UAW,
Volkswagen will announce in the coming weeks that it will manufacture
its new mid-size SUV here in Chattanooga.” VW immediately denied that
cause and effect claim.

No matter, Senator Corker then assailed the UAW and its negotiated
wages and work rules for bringing down Detroit, along with the Big Three
Auto Companies – GM, Ford and Chrysler. That’s strange because for
decades the UAW lifted up industrial labor while the auto companies made
record profits. Apart from the mistake the UAW made years ago when they
sided with the auto bosses in lobbying in Congress against fuel
efficiency standards, which would have made domestically produced
vehicles more competitive with foreign imports, the responsibility for
the auto industry’s collapse lies with management. It was all about
“product, product, product,” as the auto writers say, and Detroit’s
products fell behind the Japanese and German vehicles. The J.D. Power
ratings, year after year, had U.S. cars bringing up the rear. The
foreign car companies rated higher on fit and finish, other quality
controls and fuel efficiency, while, as one former Chrysler executive
told me about his industry, “We were producing junk.”

Add these losses of sales to the speculative binge of the auto
companies’ finance subsidiaries, like Ally Financial Inc., previously
known as General Motors Acceptance Corporation, which got itself caught
in the huge Wall Street downdraft in 2008-2009. The result was that the
auto giants rushed to demand a huge taxpayer bailout from Washington,
which they were given.

It's too soon to tell whether Ted Nugent's noxious career as a
conservative pundit reached a tipping point this week, but the moment he
called in sick to CNN and backed out of a scheduled interview with Erin Burnett as Republican politiciansdenounced him
might soon be seen as a flash point for the fading rock star and the
incendiary brand of hate rhetoric he's been cashing in on for years. It
might also be viewed as a key stumbling moment for the conservative
media, which have been unable in recent years to establish any sort of
guardrails for common decency within the realm of political debate.

Increasingly reliant on bad fringe actors like Nugent to connect with
their far, far-right audience, the conservative media have built up
Obama-bashing personalities who no longer occupy any corner of the
American mainstream. Yet Nugent enjoys deep ties with Republican campaigns all across the country. When those ties receive media scrutiny, they cannot be defended.

National Rifle Association board member Nugent found himself at the
center of a campaign controversy this week when he was invited to two
public events for Texas Republican Greg Abbott, who is running for
governor. Of course Nugent, a former Washington Times columnist who now writes for birther website WND, recently called President Obama a "communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel" and has a long and vivid history of launching vile attacks on women. (He's called Hillary Clinton a "toxic cunt.")

Following waves of condemnations for the association, and a torrent of critical media coverage, with reporters and pundits wondering
why a gubernatorial candidate would voluntarily campaign with someone
who spouts "insane and racist talk," as CNN's Jake Tapper put it, Abbott claimed he wasn't aware
of Nugent history of racist and misogynistic comments. If so, Abbott's
campaign staff is utterly incompetent. (The "subhuman mongrel" comment,
unearthed last month by Media Matters, was highlighted by a number of outlets at the time, including on MSNBC.)

It's likely Abbott and his staff did know about Nugent's dark rhetoric, since that's all he traffics in. But
because that kind of hate speech has become so accepted and even
celebrated within the bubble for right-wing media, they failed to see
the danger of embracing it.

Following the ill-fated campaign events, which made national
headlines, Abbott has defended the decision to bring Nugent to the
state, claiming that in Texas politics Nugent remain popular. But if
inviting Nugent to become an Abbott surrogate was so clever, why did
likely Republican presidential hopeful Rand Paul step forward to
denounce Nugent and his "offensive" Obama commentary? Continue reading at: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/02/21/ted-nugent-and-how-the-conservative-press-cant/198167

What Tom Perkins and Co don’t know can only make the rest of us stronger

The White House administration official who proposed taking on
“income inequality” as the dominant theme of Obama’s second term must
have thought the move was at least halfway clever: I mean, try as the
Right may to argue against the administration’s preferred mechanisms to undo income inequality, honestly, what kind of jerk would straight-up defend it?

Well,
it turns out there are two kinds. Call them the emotional alarmist and
the pseudo-scientific apologist. Both variations were on display in the
past week, in the form of zillionaire Tom Perkins and economist-to-the-zillionaires, former Romney adviser Greg Mankiw.
Both Perkins and Mankiw are correct to be worried about how the
widening income gap might inspire more class consciousness. They’re just
wrong about which side is the underdog.

Perkins, the venture
capitalist and emotional alarmist, has been in the news quite a bit
lately, due to his Wall Street Journal letter-to-the-editor comparing
agitation about income inequality to declaring war on the wealthy.
Specifically, declaring World War II: Perkins warned that “‘progressive’
radicalism” is the “descendent” Kristallnacht.

The
ensuing uproar had Perkins rethinking his vocabulary but not backing
down from the imagery. “Kristallnacht should never have been used,” he said in the splashy aftermath of the assertion. “I regret the use of that word. I don’t regret the message at all.” In other words: I’m sorry I used a term that refers to the early stages of the Holocaust, but we’re in the early stages of a Holocaust.At a Fortune magazine event
last Thursday that took its name from the larger point of his original
screed – “The War on the 1%” – he went a step further. Higher taxes, he
said, will lead to the “economic extinction” of the 1%. So there you go:
he didn’t mean genocide, he meant something worse. At least as far as Tom Perkins is concerned.

The
use of a Nazi metaphor is so provocative, and apologizing for it is so
vital, that it’s easy to lose sight of what else is wrong with the
Perkins analogy: it’s not the rich who are being attacked; they are now
the ones doing the attacking. The metaphor was terrible – and he got it
backwards anyway. There is, for instance, already one side of his
imagined conflict living in ghettos. Even more to the point, there is
not an epidemic of rich people dying younger and younger or becoming
sicker and sicker. Would it comfort Tom Perkins to know that the “life
expectancy gap” in America is widening even more quickly as that of
income? In 1980, the richest Americans could expect to live about 1.8
years longer than poorest; by 2000, they could expect to live 4.5 years
longer, a jump of almost 40 percent. Meanwhile, income inequality has increased by 25 percent.

This
is good news for the apocalyptic scenario of super-rich America!
Perkins and his compatriots won’t have to fight off the poor; they’ll
just have to wait them out. Far from facing “economic extinction”, the
1% will just have even more trouble finding good help.

Basically everywhere but the U.S. had a warmer than average month

Last month was the fourth-warmest January on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported
Thursday, with temperatures 1.17 degrees warmer than the 20th century
average. Since we started keeping track back in 1880, only 2002, 2003
and 2007 have had a warmer start to their year.

Yes, that’s this past January we’re talking about. Because, as Philip Bump put it, not everyone lives near you, or
was in the direct path of the polar vortex. This handy map from the
NOAA neatly demonstrates how, while it might have been cold at your
house, most of the world experienced a uncharacteristically balmy
January:

So there you go. One final, definitive way to shut down the trolls who keep insisting that global warming can’t be happening because it’s cold outside. Add it to the rest, then let’s be done with this inanity, okay?

The evidence is mounting that natural gas has no net climate benefit
in any timescale that matters to humanity. In the real world, natural
gas is not a “bridge” fuel to a carbon-free economy for two key reasons.

First, natural gas is mostly methane, (CH4), a super-potent greenhouse gas, which traps 86 times
as much heat as CO2 over a 20-year period. So even small leaks in the
natural gas production and delivery system can have a large climate
impact — enough to gut the entire benefit of switching from coal-fired
power to gas.

Sadly as a comprehensive new Stanford study reconfirms, “America’s natural gas system is leaky.” The news release explains:

A review of more than 200 earlier studies
confirms that U.S. emissions of methane are considerably higher than
official estimates. Leaks from the nation’s natural gas system are an important part of the problem.

Second, natural gas doesn’t just displace coal — it also displaces
carbon-free sources of power such as renewable energy, nuclear power,
and energy efficiency. A recent analysis
finds that effect has been large enough recently to wipe out almost the
entire climate benefit from increasing natural gas use in the utility
sector if the leakage rate is only 1.2 percent (comparable to the EPA’s
now discredited new lowball estimate).

In fact, as a major paper we reported on
in November found, “The US EPA recently decreased its CH4 emission
factors for fossil fuel extraction and processing by 25–30% (for
1990–2011), but we find that CH4 data from across North America instead
indicate the need for a larger adjustment of the opposite sign.”

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson